Epic Games has notoriously been fighting with Valve’s Steam over the 30% cut Steam demands from game developers, but they have also been battling Google over their similar policy. The Epic Games Sore takes only 12% from developers to sell their games on the Epic Games Store PC client. Through this client, they also offer free games every week while still paying the developers for the downloads. This is all possible because of the monster sales of Fortnite and it’s many in-game purchases. Steam used to take 30% from developers but many argue the bigger cut was worth it because the Steam UI is more user friendly and has a deep established library from being the oldest platform around. After tough competition from Epic Games, Steam has developed a friendlier policy for it’s biggest games. If the game sales exceed $10 million, Steam will take 25% and if they reach $50 million the percentage is lowered to 20%. Indie companies are left in the dark but the tentpole games stay around on Steam.
This is relatively old news at this point, but Google has been in this fight for just as long and won’t bend. Epic Games wants to offer it’s games to Android users through the Google Play App store. But Google still demands the 30% cut for all purchase made through their payment services, that includes all the Fortnite customizations. Epic Games had to finally give in as Google became more and more aggressive towards the players that used the workaround on Android phones. Players used to be able to play by grabbing the game from the browser; but the OS is starting to treat the game as malicious software, disrupting players with warnings. Epic still feels that Google’s stranglehold on their users’ payment options is unfair and uses their own PC launcher as an example of better practices.
Sources: PC Gamer, Polygon, 9to5
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